College dropouts

The next time someone starts talking about the constitutional sanctity of the Electoral College, think about the image below. The EC, as we all know, is a work of political genius. Because, you know, the Founders.

Getting rid of the Electoral College is another one of the many things that's "too hard" or "too complicated" in present-day America. But surely a nation that succeeded in ridding itself of slavery,

achieved universal suffrage and killed off Jim Crow (at least for a while) can send this anti-democratic relic of an eighteenth century political compromise to the political dumpster.

Of course, even after the Electoral College is gone, there will be a lot of work left to do if we are to live up to our ideal of one person, one vote: gerrymandering will need to be tackled; other barriers to voting, such as onerous identification requirements, will have to be eliminated; nor will suffrage ever be universal until felons and ex-felons are guaranteed the right to vote. Much more difficult, admittedly perhaps "too hard" and "too complicated," will be democratizing the Senate (possibly by abolishing the upper chamber and replacing the Congress with a unicameral legislative body -- there is no reason, beyond historical accident, why the residents of a state with, say, 360,000 citizens should have the same representation as a state with, say, 36,000,000 -- and the runaway imperial presidency must be reduced to its original role as executor of the legislature's intentions -- the Founders, royalists though most of them were, never intended to create a serial king.

But first things first. If the constitutional requirement can't be met to amend it out of existence, there are other ways to upend it, such as the National Popular Vote interstate compact already adopted by 11 states and the District of Columbia and close to passage in 11 more, a solution as jerry-rigged as the problem it is attempting to fix but at least a step in the right direction until we're able to solve our political issues like grown-ups.

Extra credit:
✓ Former secretary of labor Robert Reich warns that hundreds of thousands are being disenfranchised: Jim Crow Is Making a Furious Comeback by Robert Reich (AlterNet).
✓ After the 2010 election, state lawmakers nationwide started introducing hundreds of harsh measures making it harder to vote. The new laws range from strict photo ID requirements to early voting cutbacks to registration restrictions: New Voting Restrictions in America by The Brennan Center for Justice.
✓ 6.1 million citizens will be barred from voting on election day: Why Prisoners and Ex-Felons Should Retain the Right to Vote by Gregg D. Caruso PhD (Psychology Today).
✓ The upper house is a malapportioned, anti-democratic embarrassment: The United States Senate is a failed institution by Ian Millhiser (Think Progress).
✓ Congress is too dysfunctional to act as a check on executive power: Abolish the Senate. It's the only way to rein in modern presidents. by John Bicknell (Washington Post).
✓ The President's threats against North Korea expose the many dangers of the White House's post-9/11 powers. Here's what Congress must do: Don’t Just Impeach Trump. End the Imperial Presidency by Jeet Heer (New Republic).

Addendum:
Neil Freeman redrew the state borders in another attempt to help us think about the undemocratic nature of our federal system as currently organized. Currently, "[t]he largest state is 66 times as populous as the smallest," Freeman explains on his site, "and has 18 times as many electoral votes." His map is based on 2010 Census data, which records a population of 308,745,538 for the United States. Divided up among 50 equal states, that's a little over six million people per state. Made equal by population, they might look like this:

Electoral college reform (fifty states with equal population) by Neil Freeman (Fake Is The New Real)

And:

You're welcome to trot this out the next time the topic of the electoral college comes up

Background: How the 2012 Presidential Election Demonstrated Why the Electoral College Must Be Reformed...

...and One Way It Can Be Done

"The United States has reached an unprecedented level of inequality in presidential elections. In 2012, only 10 states drew the major party presidential candidates for post-convention campaign events, and those same 10 states attracted 99.6% of all general election television advertising spending by the campaigns and their allies. The remaining 41 spectator states (counting the District of Columbia) included all 38 states that had been similarly overlooked in 2008. This article details these inequalities and their roots in state statutes allocating electoral votes on a winner-take-all basis. It argues that states should end this inequality by enacting the National Popular Vote interstate compact, which would ensure that it is the popular vote in all 50 states and the District of Columbia that determines who becomes the president." -- Robert Richie and Andrea Levien of FairVote.

The rest of the story: The Contemporary Presidency - How the 2012 Presidential Election Has Strengthened the Movement for the National Popular Vote Plan by Robert Richie and Andrea Levien (FairVote).

Democracy: 23 Proposals to Revitalize the US Constitution

I find myself unpersuaded by many of Larry Sabato's 23 Proposals to Revitalize the US Constitution. Drawn from his book, A More Perfect Constitution, where they are well-argued, they are certainly worthy of consideration. To my mind, though, he gives too little emphasis to rebuilding accountable institutions (labor unions, political parties, community groups), and it strikes me that some of the ideas he embraces where adopted have turned out to have unintended consequences: term limts, for example, meant to encourage frequent rotation of office (the political value of that goal escapes me, but never mind) has in practice tended to increase the power of bureaucracies and lobbies, not an outcome Sabato desires, I think. I have no disagreement, however, with his basic premise that our political system is seriously in need of reform. Here's the list:

Congress:

1. Expand the Senate to 136 members to be more representative: Grant the 10 most populous states 2 additional Senators, the 15 next most populous states 1 additional Senator, and the District of Columbia 1 Senator. [See, Democracy: How do we achieve One Person One Vote? (Impractical Proposals 2009-10-09)]

2. Appoint all former Presidents and Vice Presidents to the new office of “National Senator.”

3. Mandate non-partisan redistricting for House elections to enhance electoral competition.

4. Lengthen House terms to 3 years (from 2) and set Senate terms to coincide with all Presidential elections, so the entire House and Senate would be elected at the same time as the President.

5. Expand the size of the House to approximately 1,000 members (from current 435), so House members can be closer to their constituents, and to level the playing field in House elections.

6. Establish term limits in the House and Senate to restore the Founders’ principle of frequent rotation in office.

7. Add a Balanced Budget Amendment to encourage fiscal fairness to future generations.

8. Create a Continuity of Government procedure to provide for replacement Senators and Congresspeople in the event of deaths or extensive incapacitation.

Presidency:

9. Establish a new 6-year, 1-time Presidential term with the option for the President to seek 2 additional years in an up/down referendum of the American people.

10. Limit some Presidential war-making powers and expand Congress’s oversight of war-making.

11. Give the President a line-item veto.

12. Allow men and women not born in the U.S. to run for President or Vice President after having been a citizen for 20 years.

Supreme Court:

13. Eliminate lifetime tenure for federal judges in favor of non-renewable 15-year terms for all federal judges.

14. Grant Congress the power to set a mandatory retirement age for all federal judges.

15. Expand the size of the Supreme Court from 9 to 12 to be more representative.

16. Give federal judges guaranteed cost of living increases so pay is never an issue.

Politics:

17. Write a new constitutional article specifically for the politics of the American system.

18. Adopt a regional, staggered lottery system, over 4 months, for Presidential party nominations to avoid the destructive front-loading of primaries.

19. Mend the Electoral College by granting more populated states additional electors, to preserve the benefits of the College while minimizing the chances a President will win without a majority of the popular vote.

20. Reform campaign financing by preventing wealthy candidates from financing their campaigns, and by mandating partial public financing for House and Senate campaigns.

21. Adopt an automatic registration system for all qualified American citizens to guarantee their right to vote is not abridged by bureaucratic requirements.

Universal National Service:

22. Create a Constitutional requirement that all able-bodied young Americans devote at least 2 years of their lives in service to the country.

National Constitutional Convention:

23. Convene a new Constitutional Convention using the state-based mechanism left to us by the Framers in the current Constitution.

Although intended to advance democracy, some of these proposals strike me as anti-democratic.  Why should former leaders who have lost the confidence of the citizenry, a Jimmy Carter, say, or a George W. Bush, be restored to a degree of power by lifetime appointment to the Senate? (And vice presidents?  Makes you wonder for a minute if Sabato is kidding.) Unless you adopt other "reforms"  -- regional qualifications?  race and gender quotas? -- it's difficult to see why additional  justices would make the Supreme Court any more representative. Term limits actually limit the power of voters to decide who will represent them. A balanced budget amendment would restrict the ability of future generations to deal flexibly with crises like the current financial meltdown (and why not deficit-finance infrastructure projects, if it is intended that future generations will reap the benefits?). The line-item veto is a direct attack on representative democracy.

In making his case, Sabato, who is founder of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia, is a good deal more subtle, cogent and persuasive than he comes across in outline. The reforms he suggests reflect the values he believes are already present in the Constitution: pragmatism, flexibility, fairness, the quest for equality and for justice. Whether his particular suggestions are the best ones to achieve a more perfect constitution, they are commendably thoughtful and well articulated.

Maybe, eventually, a constitutional convention will be needed to get the American experiment back on course. In the meantime, there are more limited actions -- serious campaign finance reform, an amendment to retire the electoral college, weekend voting, instant run-offs, proportional representation -- that will tend to make the system more responsive and accountable. The struggle for reform has just begun. The debate will continue. The road to go is long. A More Perfect Constitution makes a good start.

Source: "23 Proposals to Revitalize the US Constitution," from A More Perfect Constitution: Ideas to Inspire a New Generation by Larry J. Sabato.

The Franchise: Making every vote count

The long lines at the polls become even more puzzling when you consider this:

According to Curtis Gans,

Despite lofty predictions by some academics, pundits, and practitioners that voter turnout would reach levels not seen since the turn of the last century, the percentage of eligible citizens casting ballots in the 2008 presidential election stayed at virtually the same relatively high level as it reached in the polarized election of 2004....The percentage of eligible citizens voting Republican declined to 28.7 percent down 1.3 percentage points from 2004. Democratic turnout increased by 2.6 percentage points from 28.7 percent of eligibles to 31.3 percent. It was the seventh straight increase in the Democratic share of the eligible vote since the party's share dropped to 22.7 percent of eligibles in 1980.

Increased absentee voting. Increased early voting. The Democrats up a little. The Republicans down a little. But overall, only a marginal increase in the number of voters. So why the long lines?

Although a greater interest among voters concentrated in particular precincts -- areas with large populations of black voters or students, for example -- might have created enough congestion at those polls to satisfy the media's expectation of a big turnout, isn't it more likely that the impact of the electoral college, leading as it does to the disenfranchisement of minority party voters in non-competitive states and the focus of campaigns on a handful of constituencies, led to longer lines in those few locales where voters knew their vote would count. I know people in California and New York, for example, who stayed home because they felt their choice for president was moot.

Some of the advance voting problems can be attributed to the limited number of polling places in most jurisdictions. Nevada, an exception, allowed voting in some grocery stores -- it would be helpful to know how that worked out, but most states required early voters to travel to some remote county office or isolated post office to drop off ballots. If unprecedented numbers of people voted in advance, it must have eased the pressure on election day; and repeated warnings over many months of an impending deluge of ballots gave election officials plenty of opportunity to get ready; so it still seems odd that there were the number of problems there were on voting day.

Not being much of a conspiracy theorist, I'm reluctant to sign on to the theory that there was a plot to depress the tally. But it would be useful to the proper management of future efforts of this sort if we knew what did happen this time. Even if it was only a matter of increased turnout in districts where voting mattered, there might be ways to prepare for such eventualities in coming elections.

In any event, if it is not going to continue to distort campaigns and alter outcomes of elections, we have to get rid of the electoral college. It's past time for every citizen's vote to count equally.